Skip to content
0:00 / 0:00

#larp#dmx#emptyepsilon

Ropecon 2019: Essi Santala, Sampo Juustila: Odysseus – Where Code Meets Light and Sound

Ropecon

2.1K subscribers • 1 video on Hallway

YouTube
  • Recommended by 2 people: 2 on Hacker News.
  • A classic. People kept recommending it from 2021 to 2026.
  • Presented by Essi Santala, lighting designer, and Sampo Juustila, software engineer

Intermediate. Assumes working knowledge.

1K views7 years ago2 recommendations

Systems programmingHardwareEmbedded systemsGame design

Essi Santala and Sampo Juustila explain how they built the technology for a spaceship LARP using embedded systems and AV controls.

How do over ten different systems, hundreds of controllable lights, dozens of loudspeakers and thousands of work hours become a spaceship? In this talk we describe how the Odysseus spaceship was brought to life using IT systems and AV technology, and what lessons were learnt during the process. Essi Santala has worked for 8 years as a lighting designer in professional theaters and Sampo Juustila for 10 years as a software engineer.

Why it's here

2 people recommend this

What people say. Recommended for its fascinating look at the complex IT and electronics work behind a physical spaceship simulator.

trynewideason Hacker News • Recommends

On “Empty Epsilon: a fully open-source spaceship bridge simulator game”

…ving a rudimentary optional HTTP API to trigger scenario events, manipulate game state, and control player stations. A Finnish group used EE in their large 2019 LARP event Odysseus: link The custom backend for the tech, which included several systems and physical interfaces outside of EE that interfaced with the game, got a good talk at RopeCon: link to this video A French LARP scene has an active fork with features more geared toward that usage: link…

hifikunoon Hacker News • Recommends

On “The Collective Ambition Behind Odysseus, a Game-Changing Sci-Fi Larp”

I love Odysseus so much. On one hand I think it sounds amazing and would love the opportunity to play it one day. On the other, from a technical accomplishment of volunteer work it is amazing! Just the IT work alone. Here's a video I found years ago by one of the volunteers talking about the work they put into the electronics. link to this video

starkparkeron Hacker News • Mentions

On “Thorium – A Starship Bridge Simulator”

EmptyEpsilon has support for a bunch of DMX flavors as well as Hue lights and custom control surfaces, as well as an optional exposable API that can run Lua scripts on game state. Odysseus LARP paired that functionality with a bunch of RPi Zero W-powered hardware puzzles to represent ship systems,1 so Engineers had to physically tinker with things in order to get systems back up and running after they broke. That included things like going through crawlspaces and ladders to access certain components, digging through a printed manual when computer systems were "down". 1: link to this video